Soft Story

Notice some 12,000 or so dingbats looking different lately? Or at least since 2016, when landlords began installing steel moment frames into the delicate, deadly facades? Thanks to an LA city ordinance mandating soft-story retrofits, where there was one column there are now two, and fresh patches of stucco mask the reinforced structure beneath.

Everyone’s shocked how smoothly it went, given the nasty fight seven years ago over who exactly would pay for it. (Tenants, it was decided, would be stuck with 50 percent of the bill, a climb-down from an earlier program in San Francisco that passed on all the costs to renters.) Still on the retrofit agenda: 1,300 non-ductile concrete structures and twenty-five steel towers with structural kinks that need straightening out. They’re dangerous, everyone knows it, and still landlords are begging for reprieve. From what? It’s inevitable that our building stock—vital infrastructure that the state “can’t” touch and “can’t” fund—will need both, bad, soon. The soft-story success may never scale to big budgets and corporate landlords …